In 1997, Thomas Lee joined an expedition of archaeologists and spelunkers to
the Chiapas region of Mexico. There, in a series of caves hundreds of feet
above the Rio La Venta, the expedition members found the remains of a people
called the Zoque who once inhabited the region. Some 20 miles from the caves,
the archaeologists also stumbled across a large ceremonial site, which they
named El Tigre. In the following interview, Lee recounts the highlights of
that expedition, and his hopes for future work in the region.

NOVA: Why are the Zoque important?

Rio La Venta

TL: Well, they got started 1,500 years earlier than the Maya. They were the
beginnings of settled village life and participated in the very beginnings of
ceramics and adaptation of agriculture in this part of Mesoamerica; that makes
them very important in the general history and the evolution of the
Maya, and everyone else who comes alongside them or behind them in time. They were the Olmecs.

NOVA: How did you first come to know about the caves along Rio La Venta?

TL: What happened was that some hunters in the 1940s acquired cloth and some
other archaeological materials from a cave and gave those to Tulane University.
Tulane published that and I was able to locate the guide who had taken those
hunters into the canyon and he took me back to that cave in the late '60s. And
so I excavated in that cave. And that's what we call Media Luna. Media Luna was
really the first modern archaeological excavation in that area.

Partially-excavated remains of a child

NOVA: In one of the caves, you found the remains of children who had been
sacrificed. Were these the children of the people who were doing the
sacrificing? Or were these possibly children that were taken from another
community to be sacrificed?

TL: Well, Sahagun describes this for the 16th century among the Nahuatl, the
Aztec. He said the priests went out and went towards the market and looked for
women who were selling their children—their babes in arms. And so I think
it's probably pretty logical that, if you had slave children, you would use
them first. If you didn't have anybody else, maybe you'd have to sacrifice one
of your own children. It sounds pretty—boy, it couldn't be much more
terrible. But it's gone on again and again all over the world.

NOVA: Is the work that you carried out early in 1997 the beginning of a larger
project?

TL: Yeah, a long project, we plan on carrying out there. The canyon offers
dry caves, which present the possibility of recovering materials that we can't
find anywhere else—cloth, cords, vegetable remains, and whole burials with
clothing still on them, and that sort of thing. We knew the people were living

Zoque cloth

and weaving cotton cloth, but now we have the cotton cloth. And it's very
beautiful as a matter of fact. It's like a lace weave, the design is woven in
on the loom. So it's, it's a very beautiful cloth.

NOVA: Tell us more about the textiles you found.

TL: Well, you know, I saw them against the light for just a few minutes. I
haven't seen them since. I suppose some day I will. But since they're delicate,
they were supposed to go off to Mexico and be conserved. And then come back,
and then we could study and photograph them. I don't even have photographs of
them. The Zoques had cloth with up to 70 to 80 threads per inch. And that was all,
of course, spun by hand and woven by hand. The designs we've seen so far were
not embroidered. They were actually worked into the weaving, which is a much
more difficult process.

NOVA: You found incense burners in some of the caves; what was burned in
them?

TL: Well, incense. But also cloths that were used to catch the blood of the
auto sacrifice—from the nose or the fingers or the genitals or the ears—the blood is caught in this special cloth and is burnt. Food was also burnt as
part of the offering. And even parts of the body were burnt, like the heart and
other things were special offerings to the gods.

NOVA: As a way of providing nourishment to the gods?

TL: Yes.

Incense burner

NOVA: You also found a mirror. What do you suspect that was used for?

TL: Well, the mirrors were for devination; the shamans used them. But they
were also a great status symbol, because they were very difficult to make. And
as you may recall, in the history of the conquest, Montezuma supposedly foresaw
the coming of Cortez by looking in his mirror. So he had one. And in some of
the principle burials at the sites we've excavated, we find the highest
individual often has a mirror. Sometimes the mirrors are oxidized and what we
really wind up with is the back part. So that mirror in that cave is really
special because we've never seen a mirror in the country - in these open sites
- that had some kind of fabric woven to it.

NOVA: Tell us about the expedition itself.

TL: You know, it's really merciless country to work in—too hot and rugged for a 63-year-old
man. But I had the time of my life, I'll tell you. I'd do it again. Because
you know, things are exciting. I've worked a lot of Zoque archaeology, but I
never worked a building with the wall standing and a doorway you could walk
into and covered with beautiful decoration.

NOVA: You're referring to the large "El Tigre" site that you found on the
expedition—what kind of shape was it in?

TL: It's basal platform was filled in with rubble, and—it's a real snake pit, I'll tell you.
It's just got a leaf mulch on top and then all these little caves are just
filled with snakes.

Pyrite mirror

NOVA: Literally with snakes.

TL: Literally with snakes. Yeah, it's no fun. It's a bad area in that sense.
You know, the two guys who took us down in there said, "We're not going to
sleep here because we're afraid of the tigers." So we built a big fire and
didn't hear even one that night. But I got to talking to one of these guys and
he said, "You know, it's funny, we're all afraid of the tiger, but there are
more people that die from snake bite than tigers. We haven't lost anybody from
a tiger here, but we've lost three or four people from snake bites." Tigers
are fierce but they're not that lethal.

NOVA: Did you find that the structures at El Tigre had astronomical
alignment?

TL: Yeah, I can't prove it because we didn't have the time, but they obviously did—all the sites are laid out astronomically.

NOVA: What are some of the celestial markers that were used?

TL: Well, we won't know until we've actually worked it out. Because it
changes in different places. This would have to be done by an expert, in order
to really come up with specifics in terms of one celestial body or another.
You have to have really precise measurements. I wouldn't, at this point, dare
say, "It's aligned with Venus."

NOVA: Could you tell how large a population lived at El Tigre?

Stone wall at El Tigre

TL: Well, we really needed to get a better handle on the other possible sites
in the area. But certainly, it had to run into the hundreds. Because there's
just so much work invested there in terms of moving those rocks around.
There's lots of rocks in there that would take 50 men to move, you know, with
rollers and crowbars.

NOVA: So, in thinking about your return trips, is your greatest hope still to
find a book?

TL: Yeah.

NOVA: It's a dream?

TL: Yeah, that's what draws me on. I'd rather find one page of a book than a
chest of gold, you know. I'd settle for a half a page. That's why I went into
the cave in the '60s, because I thought, if there's any place where there's a
book, it's going to be down in one of these dry caves where people haven't
gotten into it. For one thing, it's an isolated area, and the other thing is
that the preservation is such that the book could have resisted the centuries.
But, you know, I'll probably never find it.

Thomas A. Lee is professor at the University of Sciences and Arts of the State of
Chiapas. He took his Master's degree in 1966 in anthropology at the University of Arizona,
Tucson, and has spent 35 years working as an archaeologist in southern Mexico. Lee has
published over 100 scientific books and articles, and was recently awarded the Premio Chiapas
in Science by the Chiapas State Government in recognition of his service in writing the
ancient history of the area.